Men, Women and Rebecca Solnit: Is 10 Millenium of Subjugation enough.

August 21, 2012

I have written at length regarding the 10 millennium subjugation of woman even to the point of half-jokingly suggesting that the survival of humanity requires men stepping aside in favor of woman assuming control our species destiny given the fact that we men have so placed that survival in jeopardy (here). I suggested in another post that the current US presidential election could represent the last hurrah of the white male (here). Perhaps, despite the fact that no woman heads the ticket of either party, instead it could be looked at as the first election in the emancipation of women, given the stark differences in approach on gender issues between the two parties.

In the 1930s the NAZI’s had a number of simple solutions to the problems rampant in German society at the time. Among them was to cure the unemployment problem by sending women who had jobs back to their homes. Today among the simple solutions proposed for addressing the problems facing US society one party proposes returning women to the role as mere machines for reproduction.

Perhaps one of the more perceptive articles, and one that I highly recommend, on how even the most accomplished women are not so subtly silenced by many men written by Rebecca Solnit (here) in which she commented:

“A Freudian would claim to know what they have and I lack, but intelligence is not situated in the crotch—even if you can write one of Virginia Woolf‘s long mellifluous musical sentences about the subtle subjugation of women in the snow with your willie.”

When I wrote the above in another context one of my conservative Republican correspondents responded that perhaps women should repay men for all the money they have spent upon them throughout the millennia. Imagine if you will the situation were reversed and men were subject to thousands of years of slavery, prohibited from independent expression and kept merely as an instrument for procreation. They finally rise up seeking their independence only to be presented with the demand that they repay the second-rate meal they were begrudgingly subjected to in an attempt to get into their pants. Why I predict the response of the men would be revolution. Wait, wasn’t that the usual response whenever a repressor demands repayment for the supposed benefits of subjugation?

For at least 10,000 years or so virtually every political system, economic system and religion has been designed by men for men. There is no natural or divine law that requires any of these structures to be designed in the way that they have been. During those same 10,000 years every justification of those structures have been developed by men to benefit men.